Project Compass

While some projects are more challenging than others, each one requires constant care to stay on track. The most useful tactic I’ve found to keep projects aligned and moving forward is by controlling three distinct areas:

1. Where we are right now.
2. Where we’re going next.
3. What we’ve learned so far.

With particularly challenging projects, you can quickly spot problem areas:

• When you don’t know the current status, you need to orient the team.
• When you don’t know where you’re headed, you need to establish direction.
• When you don’t know the historical context, you need to capture learnings.

I call this the Project Compass. Each part is a wayfinder, helping you navigate the unknowns and inevitable obstacles in a project’s lifecycle.

When the project is amiss, ask yourself:

• Do we know where we are right now?
• Do we know where we are headed?
• Do we know how we got here?

The answers show you the way.

Status

Status is the orientation. It’s the baseline understanding of where the project is.

• Are we on track?
• Are we off track?
• Are we at risk?

This is almost always dependent on the deadline for the project. I call it The Sacred Timeline, and it’s the anchor by which you measure progress.

A project without a deadline is a project without a realistic goal. Even if the deadline is arbitrary, it’s an important constraint to anchor decisions. It forces trade-offs, and trade-offs are required prerequisites to deliver work on time.

My favorite way to communicate status is through Weekly Updates (Issue #11). Record a Loom-style video to share a visual that communicates the status of the project: where you are in the schedule, key updates, and priorities for the upcoming week. It’s easy to lose orientation, especially in projects on longer timelines, so it’s important to remind your team of where you are each week, with a clear and visual touchpoint.

I like to use digital boards like FigJam to create a Status Board, which is the visual representation of where the project is. The principle matters more than the tool.

Keep it simple with traffic-light colors:

• Green means we’re on track.
• Red means we’re off track.
• Yellow means we’re at risk.

And then layer in additional context that helps the team find its orientation.

Strategy

Strategy provides direction. It lets the team know where you’re heading, and it’s a critical component to informing decisions while delivering the project. High-quality decisions are built upon context, and strategy is the driver for decisions.

People often view strategy as long-term planning. I don’t see it that way. I think strategy is about the next best move, The Next Step. You don’t need to know every step you’re going to take, but you need a clear direction to move. This is the strategy.

If status is your current location, strategy is where you’re heading next.

You can include strategy updates as part of your status updates. When you orient the team with your current progress, it’s a good opportunity to show where you’re heading next—a preview of what’s coming to help inform their decisions today.

I like to approach strategy with an Experimental Mindset (Issue #15). If you know where you are right now (status), then you can design small, low-risk experiments to find the path ahead.

One example of this was on a recent project where we released a new product to a waitlist during the launch. I wanted to gain insights to drive the product roadmap, so instead of guessing, I tested a simple hypothesis:

If we onboard 10 users directly, we’ll gain insights to improve the product.

Normally, I would send invite emails to new users, let them self-onboard, and then offer a scheduling link for a user interview. But it’s hard to get folks to schedule the interview. So I designed an experiment based on this hypothesis:

Send the invite email and include a scheduling link for the onboarding.

That way, new users had to schedule time with me in order to get into the product. Fortunately, there was a large enough waitlist to warrant this additional friction.

You don’t need a five-year strategy. You need to know what direction you’re heading, and the best way to do so is through continuous experimentation and learning.

Storage

Storage is the memory. This is the area where all ongoing knowledge is captured and stored for later reference. And this is the area that is most often missed on projects.

The most important thing to store? Decisions.

Decisions build on one another. If you don’t pause to understand not just what decisions were made, but also why they were made and whether they worked as intended, then you will create massive gaps in knowledge. And this will keep being passed down through the team.

I don’t know why we decided to do it this way.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before. I have. A lot. It’s a common expression on teams where knowledge is not captured, stored, and shared effectively. Those are three ways you need to manage the collective memory of the project:

1. Capture the information when it happens.
2. Store the information in an accessible place.
3. Share the information with all team members.

I often use Project Logs (Issue #16) for this purpose, and recently started keeping a “Decision Log” on one project where critical decisions were made. This is a simple Basecamp messages list that outlines the problem, options to solve the problem, and then the decision, which includes any and all context on the decision. I even had one team member comment on the decision message with more context, which I then used to update the logged decision. Beautiful.

This is also where Artifact Mining (Issue #35) can help. When you create a regular rhythm around capturing and storing key learnings along the way, you are primed for sharing these learnings with your team. This, in turn, improves the context. And, if you recall from earlier, context is what drives our strategy.

The better the context, the better the decisions.

The Project Brain

Like a brain, a project requires a holistic understanding of distinct areas to function, with its own unique structure and pathways to drive communication and progress. The parietal lobe in the brain deals with real-time processing (the status); the frontal lobe deals with decision-making (the strategy); the hippocampus deals with memory (the storage).

Our lives, both work and professional, are driven around projects—a focused effort to achieve a specific goal within a defined time. While some are more complex than others, they all require diligent management and cultivation, a Project Compass to guide the journey.

You need to know where you are (the status), where you’re heading (the strategy), and what you’re learned so far (the storage).